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Smart Wells - Offshore | ABB Ability™

Enables maximized production whilst providing analytics for monitoring and optimizing performance.

The ABB Ability™ Smart Wells portfolio consists of subscription-based services and applications with no CAPEX and no lock-in. Customers are free to add and/or cancel subscriptions according to their operational needs, from the reservoir through separation to export. All Smart Wells services and applications can be installed at any facility, independent of control system vendor and degree of instrumentation.

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Our offerings

Slug management

Autonomized Well Ramp-up

Virtual Flow Metering

Water Injection Management

Erosion Insight

ESP reliability

Slug management

At certain mixtures of gas and liquid in a raiser system, large "bodies" of liquid can be formed and will exit the pipelines in uncontrolled bursts followed by large volumes of gas. These bursting bodies of liquid are called "slugs", and the phenomena is called "slugging". If not handled, the slugs lead to volume bursts that are higher than the acceptable thresholds of the processing facilities, causing shutdown and loss of production.

Our solutions

With ABB Ability™ Slug Management, the slugs are controlled by balancing the choke opening to handle the slugs at an acceptable level keeping the production as high as possible. The solution has proven very successful with cases of 8-10% production increase.

Autonomized Well Ramp-up

Wells are normally ramped up manually in a conservative way to protect the integrity of the well during periodic integrity testing and other planned/unplanned shutdowns. The result of this is a hidden production loss since the wells can be ramped up faster by using an autonomized approach still keeping the well integrity in a safe range.

Our solutions
With Autonomized Well Ramp-up, operators are able to speed up the process and increase production. By monitoring and controlling critical variables in all the wells during ramp-up, and knowing what is happening in the well’s process dynamics, the speed of the ramp-up is adjusted accordingly.

For example, there are 16 wells in production at Ormen Lange in the North Sea. Each well extends 2000 meters below the seabed and is surrounded by gravel and sand. Previously, it typically took 9 hours to ramp up a low pressure well and 15-20 hours for a high pressure well. The process was safe, but it did not take into account what was happening in the wells in real time. After installation of ABB's solution, the wells can now be opened much faster than before and with reduced risk to well integrity and safety. On average, it now takes only 2 hours to open low pressure wells and 6 hours to open high pressure wells.

Virtual Flow Metering

Reservoir management and production optimization are important activities to any oil and gas producer. To be able to perform these activities, information about production rates, water cut and gas oil ratio from the different well reservoir zones are required. The production rates are normally gathered through well tests, such as test-by-difference, but this cause production loss and requires costly test separators. Some operators use multiphase flow meters that not only have a high CAPEX and installation cost, but also requires costly maintenance and calibration, and can be subject to failures.

Our solutions

Virtual Flow Metering is a system that calculates production rate, water cut, gas-oil ratio and distribution of pressure, temperature, velocity, etc. from reservoir to processing facilities. The flow rate of water together with pressure and temperature distribution is critical information in order to manage the required inhibitor injection rates to avoid hydrates and corrosion.

The solution can utilize any instrument in the production network, including density, water cut and flow meters. It can be used as a backup or replacement of multiphase flow meters. It is also a valuable tool for data validation on well tests and for reconciliation of multiphase flow meters or any other sensor.

Water Injection Management

For production systems, the water and gas injection rates to each well and reservoir are needed for reservoir management and production optimization. The rates are normally measured with flow meters on each well. Although not as expensive as multiphase flow meters, they still represent a significant cost that can be avoided. Downhole pressure sensors are often installed in injection wells for reservoir monitoring. However, these pressure sensors are costly and are often subject to failures that can be mitigated with soft sensors to achieve major reductions in both investment and maintenance cost as well as higher reliability.

Our solutions

Water Injection Management solution calculates most likely bottom hold pressures that enables optimized operations without fracturing of the shale layer causing major economic loss. With this solution, the operators can optimize the production by keeping the injection pressure at the target level. In addition, the solution calculates the most likely injection rates to each well. This results in improved reservoir management as it reduces the uncertainty in water injection rates.

Erosion Insight

Most oil and gas production wells produce some sand that may cause major safety hazards due to erosion and/or operating problems due to sand accumulation in pipes and process equipment.

Monitoring of erosion rates and accumulated erosion can be done with erosion probes, but as all other instruments, they represent a cost and are subject to failures. In any case, such sensors cannot be installed at all locations in the production system where erosion may occur. To be on the safe side with respect to sand erosion, production rates may have to be limited to lower than the capacity.

Soft sensor-based erosion monitoring provides erosion rates at any location. This gives increased reliability and reduced uncertainty such that the safety margin can be reduced, hence allowing higher production rates.

Our solutions
Erosion Insight provides a cross platform, model-based approach to Erosion Management. It runs in online mode as a monitoring system, or offline mode proving what-if analysis. Through intuitive navigation and visualization on multiple levels (overview and drilldown trending) of both production data and model results, it provides a better understanding of the current situation. Furthermore, integrating event data, such as well tests and choke changes, with inputs and results, operational guidelines, status visualization, choke selection tools, sand data and QA mechanisms, it is an example of the value of integrated operations.

The Erosion Insight software system can perform calculations for any erosion nodes where necessary sensor data are defined in EC/Prosty or default data can be used.

Electrical Submersible Pump (ESP) reliability

The ESP is an artificial-lift method for lifting moderate to high volumes of fluids from wellbores. The performance of ESPs in oil wells can be impacted by a wide variety of factors including the initial selection of an appropriate system components, the downhole environment, fluid properties and the practices and procedures used by well operators. Repairing a failed ESP is nearly impossible in the field and pulling the pump is a costly operation. This has resulted in that the oil companies are pulling ESPs and replacing them on a periodic basis not knowing the real condition of the ESP.

Repairing a failed ESP is nearly impossible in the field and pulling the pump is a costly operation. This has resulted in that the oil companies are pulling ESPs and replacing them on a periodic basis not knowing the real condition of the ESP.

Our solutions
ABB has been researching Electrical Signal Analysis (ESA) through a Joint Industry Project called "Asset Condition and Performance JIP", together with Equinor and Gassco. This provides us with an existing, flexible solution for condition monitoring of these pumps.

Some key elements are ability to collect all data time synchronized and to calculate accurately the shaft power delivered to the pump. Examples of algorithms included are spectral analysis of power, currents and voltages, unbalance analysis, power quality and factor, torsional oscillation analysis. This solution now need to be adapted for a specific application.

Highlights

Press release

ABB launches digital platform to boost to offshore profits and productivity

Article

ABB expands Collaborative Operations for the oil, gas and chemicals industries

Press release

ABB delivers virtual flow meters powered by Arundo Analytics

Brochure

ABB and Norske Shell - Partners in productivity

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